In his plays, Shakespeare is a poet of comedy, tragedy, history and romance—but what of philosophy? When he writes about ancient Rome, for example, does he inhabit the antique mind and see the world from its political perspective? Or does he make only superficial analogies with the ancients and write mainly of English concerns?

It depends on whom you ask. Goethe and Dr. Johnson believed that Shakespeare is an early modern writer whose Romans are Englishmen in togas. Alexander Pope, however, found him a Renaissance humanist “knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of Antiquity.” When Shakespeare writes of Rome, said Pope, “not only the Spirit but the Manner of the Romans are exactly drawn.”

Paul A. Cantor, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, sides with Pope. In his first book, “Shakespeare’s Rome” (1976), he treated the three plays “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra” as a chronicle of Rome from city to empire. Now, in “Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy,” he advances a more ambitious thesis: These plays constitute a thematically unified whole, a trilogy dramatizing, in the terms of his subtitle, “The Twilight of the Ancient World.” As Roman civic virtue led to empire, Mr. Cantor argues, empire readied the world for Christianity. He shows that Shakespeare systematically stages the virtues, vices and souls of a small martial republic, a decadent empire and a new religion.

Each Roman play concerns a focal point in the history of free citizens becoming imperial subjects. Read consecutively, the three form a panoramic study of the life and death of Rome, the ancient city whose heroes conquer all cities until no others remain. In this trilogy, the polis dies by her children.

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Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy

By Paul A. Cantor

Chicago, 302 pages, $90; $30 paper

“Coriolanus” shows a young Republic in which classes fight for honor. Plebeians and patricians, their tribunes and senators, are checks and balances on one another. Competition channels ambitions and ensures political participation. Yet overambitious men emerge. Roman heroes conquer for fame and office. For his prowess in battle, the patrician Coriolanus almost wins consulship. But his contempt for plebeians leads to his exile. He vengefully attacks Rome with her enemies and almost succeeds. Already, Rome proves vulnerable to heroes who would become Caesar.

“Julius Caesar” shows a dying Republic led by a figure like Coriolanus but who can overcome his patrician side to win over plebeians. Military rule has made the Roman people, once engaged citizens, into cynical auditors of oratory. Unlike Coriolanus, Julius Caesar becomes dictator by feigning humility and bribing the masses. Ultimately, in assassinating Caesar, Brutus and Cassius enact the Republic’s end. They resist Rome’s impulse toward empire, but the empire strikes back.

“Antony and Cleopatra” shows the effects of empire: dead cities, new longings. When Rome incorporates Greeks and Egyptians into her body politic, her citizens replace local self-governance with quietist philosophies, Eastern cults and eros. Freed from republican limits, Antony and Cleopatra—Rome and Egypt—enjoy boundless romance. Their desire for love is as limitless as empire, and marked by tyrannical ambition. “He doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus,” Cassius says of Caesar. In Antony’s time, love is a Colossus over a buried Rome.

For Nietzsche, slave morality began in a humiliated aristocracy: During the Babylonian exile, Jewish priests criticized the warrior class and preached truth to power. Humbled under Caesar, aristocrats sought consolation in new philosophies. In “Antony and Cleopatra,” Rome conquers Egypt, but Orientalism woos Rome. This ancient globalization prepares the Mediterranean world for the Gospel, because suffering under Caesar can be seen as redemptive through the lens of Christianity. In this way, the corruptions of empire, of conqueror and conquered, precondition the rise of the nascent religion. As Mr. Cantor concludes, the Roman plays form a tragedy of competing goods in historical transition: Rome is the tragedy of slave morality reinterpreting master morality.

Although Mr. Cantor traces many Nietzschean parallels in Shakespeare’s thought, and usefully brings in Machiavelli, his sketch of Shakespeare the philosopher leaves one wanting more. Comparing Shakespeare with pre-Renaissance writers seems called for: Augustine codifies pagan/Christian contrasts; Dante extolls republican virtue in Cato but punishes Brutus and Cassius. Contrasting Augustine’s and Dante’s evaluations of the Roman metamorphosis with those of Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Nietzsche would be in point.

In short, one hopes that Mr. Cantor’s book precedes a more comprehensive study of Shakespeare, Rome, politics and philosophy. Shakespeare is indeed a philosophical poet, and nowhere more so, as the present book demonstrates, than in his Roman trilogy.

—Mr. Shinkel is a researcher for the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, opening in Philadelphia in 2019.